Why do Men Oppose Abortion? The Truth is Horrifying.
It was supposed to be a simple research for my thesis on Gender Studies. I swear I didn’t plan on bringing about such chaos. I’ve been trying to understand for years why the term “pro-life” refers to choosing something that is not proven to be alive yet, instead of a real person that already has a personality, dreams, friends, family, a career and a whole life; someone that isn’t easily replaceable, someone that should matter. Why the life of a woman means so little, even to men who consider themselves progressive? Hell, even to husbands that are willing to sacrifice the person they’re supposed to love over a bunch of cells? To try to understand the nature of the opposite gender, I selected 10 straight men from all backgrounds: diverse religions, socioeconomic stands, professions, political views. They all felt at least unease at the idea of abortion, going as far as saying they would forbid their partner from getting one, even if the pregnancy was risky for her life. But they couldn’t provide me a concrete response as to why it was wrong, as to why a fetus was so important to them. I even reached out to gay men, but they were either supportive of women’s reproductive rights, or indifferent to the whole discussion since it doesn’t affect them. Things were a little bit frustrating, to be honest. I was able to step up my game when Jenna, my older sister, offered to help me redo the interviews while monitoring their vitals and brain activity, using fMRI. She had asked for her boss’ permission at the lab and everything was fine. Doing that was supposed to take us a single afternoon. Jenna and I were on the 4th interview when her boss, Dr. Myrna Addams, poked her head inside the room to check on us. “Hey, what’s that? Wow, that’s unique!” Something on the screen piqued Myrna’s interest. She asked extensively about my research, and her interest only grew. “Look, girls, you asked a question regarding feelings and empathy, but his frontal lobe is completely inactive right now. But his mesencephalon – sorry, midbrain – exploded with activity”, she pointed different areas with her slender finger. It’s cute that she thought I would understand what she was talking about because she used a less complicated word. “It’s right around the cerebral peduncles, isn’t, Doctor?” Jenna asked, with reverence. “Right, but I’d say it comprehends a bit of the tegmentum as well. You know what that means.” Great. Now they were literally speaking Latin. Jenna patiently explained to me what it meant. Apparently, the midbrain is the part that controls involuntary movements and the most basic learning skills. “So you think he believes this bullshit because he was taught this? But when and by who?” I asked. “That’s a good way of thinking, I like you”, Myrna replied, absent-mindedly. “Look, Jenna, there’s a discreet activity in the dura matter as well. But he doesn’t have meningitis.” “Oh! I see, Doctor.” “Please, do go on, I’ll stay here and take some notes.” We went ahead with the interviews and monitoring. Sometimes Myrna would exclaim “Fantastic!” or “As expected!” to herself. After we finished and let them all go, she turned to me. “The premise of your research is very smart, but I’m afraid you won’t find the answers you look for in your field. No, the reasons lay deeper”, she sounded eerie. “But if you give me a month to dissect some stuff and observe a shitload of petri dishes, I know I can crack the case for you. Yes, now I finally know what I’m looking for…” “Doctor, please, I don’t want to bother you”, I started to excuse myself, but she assured me that she had been trying to find answers to similar questions for years. I didn’t have another whole month to get my thesis ready, but I looked forward to finding deeper answers in science; so, instead of writing a paper, I ended up putting together a documentary with the interviews. I even got one of the men to admit that he cared more about his son as an embryo/fetus than after the baby was born, even though he couldn’t explain why. This one was a good ending scene because it left more questions than answers, and everyone in my field loved this sort of thing. Exactly one month after I had been at the facility where they work, Dr. Addams summoned Jenna and I to her office. She looked tired, scared, but triumphant. “I did it. Thanks to you two, I finally found the missing piece of my puzzle. It was easy proving if my theory was right, and it was, but only partially. The truth is so much worse.” She got up and grabbed a petri dish, then had us approach it cautiously and look through a microscope. “Holy fuck!” my sister rarely cussed. “What is this hungry thing? And what is the food? Is the food alive?” I watched it too, but I could only see little things moving. One of the things was growing, and the other was disappearing at what seemed to be a fast rate for things that are invisible to the eye. “Remind me, Jenna, when is the gender determined in the human species?” Myrna asked, professorial. “Around seven weeks, Doctor.” “Well, dear girls, this is an isolated pair of sexual chromosomes belonging to a seven-week old fetus. See, every new human prototype starts as a XX – a woman, biologically. But due to the lack of sexual hormones before this point, no genital is formed.” “Which one of them is the chromosome?” I asked, dumbly. “The one being eaten, of course. Look again, the other thing is feeding exclusively on the second X’s little leg, leaving everything else untouched. It’s deliberately turning it into a Y.” “How did you find that out? How didn’t anybody notice that before?” Jenna asked. “Because I knew what I was looking for, while everyone before me assumed it was a natural process”, Myrna smiled, largely and bitterly. “Have you isolated this thing?” my sister asked, worriedly looking through the microscope lens again. This time, Myrna’s smile was condescending. “On the very first night after we talked, sweetheart. I then pulled some strings with old friends owning me favors and got some… dead collaborators fresh out of the morgue… to dissect”, she smiled. “Don’t worry, I didn’t vandalize the corpses. The puncture needed to get what I need is minimal, so they’ll still look pretty on the funeral, but you can’t take it from the living. Again, you girls gave me the treasure map. I knew exactly where to look; so I extracted and analyzed the substantia nigra from women and men.” “It’s a fluid in your brain”, Jenna quickly explained to me. “And it’s located around the region with the unexpectedly high activity we saw the other day, in the mesencephalon. So of course I was right, the substantia nigra is different for men and women. One could say it’s just how men and women are biologically different, but… you know the thing that was literally eating the X chromosome? Well, I found it on 100% of the men’s substantia nigra. None in women.” “Wow! All men have equal levels of it?” I asked. For the first time, it seemed like I was able to keep up with her explanation. “It’s funny, no. The thing – let’s call it Thing Y for now – is stronger in some, weaker in some. Of course I then conducted an investigation about their behavior when they were alive. And once again, I was right.” Jenna interrupted her, horrified. “So if I get it all right, Doctor… are you saying that every man carry a disease?” “I’m saying that every man is a disease, some more than others. They love fetuses so much because they want to take over them. The way Thing Y sees it, we women are merely the goose that will lay the golden eggs. If we refuse to, we are useless”, she sighed and made a long pause. “Gay men have lower levels of Thing Y. On the other hand, the higher the concentration of Thing Y in the substantia nigra, the higher traits of what we call toxic masculinity. Homophobes, misogynists, aggressive men, rapists. I spent the last couple of weeks studying the Thing Y, and I can say for sure, it’s a protozoa. A common, dangerous protozoon that feeds exclusively on the X chromosome, mutating it; it helps forming testosterone, and then migrates to the brain and controls it.” “Wow!” I yelled. That whole moment felt like a dream-like trance, and I was still processing everything she said. “Just how many corpses you studied?” “A whole fucking lot, believe me. Girls, do you realize what I’m saying? Every man on this Earth is nothing more than an overgrown fetus with a protozoon for brain.” “Doctor, I’m so sorry, but once again I have to ask”, Jenna’s voice was trembling. “You’re a genius, but I fail to see how people didn’t find that out before you.” Myrna got up from her chair with a smirk, and opened a door behind her. It was her personal lab, and it was in complete chaos, with broken tubes and flasks, documents scattered across the floor and blood everywhere. Two dead men completed the scene. They both had been shot in the head and, if my TV show knowledge is right, the blood was still fresh from mere hours ago. I haven’t noticed before, but Myrna has a strong build and a gun on her belt. Also, she was limping. “Dear, silly Jenna, of course I’m not the first one to find that out. Many of the parasites have learned of their true nature – I wasn’t sure of that, but they’ve been trying to shut me up. Because they are a disease and they know it.” Category:Fanfic Category:Creepypasta